Many AWS users, both novice and experts, often encounter high Amazon EBS, or elastic block storage, bills. The primary reason is that these AWS EBS volumes, irrespective of whether attached to an EC2 instances or not, continue to retain information and accrue charges when active.

Often, admins encounter a bill shock because they forget to delete EBS volumes attached to individual EC2s. It’s critical to remember that AWS bills EBS separately even when these volumes are attached to individual instances. Moreover, pricing for these volumes depends on EBS storage itself (GB-months), storage used for snapshots as a backup, and provisioned IOPS (IOPS-months).

Last month, we launched two instances for testing purpose and then forgot to delete the volumes attached to them while terminating. To show the estimated pricing of these two volumes, we have used AWS Simple Calculator. It is ~$671!

Maneuvering in AWS Console:

While EBS volumes’ dependency as a primary storage device for an EC2 makes them dearer to users, their high pricing and the lack of quick access to pricing and usage information on the AWS console often annoys the same users. For the reason that these volumes get ignored by the same hands and eyes that created them dearly, says one of our in-house AWS experts. 🙂

Using the AWS Cost Explorer, you can definitely analyze cumulative AWS EBS cost by day, weeks, or months. However, you will not know which is the costliest individual EBS volume without hoping between EC2, EBS and Cost Explorer dashboards inside the console.

Here Comes the Hack: How to Find the Costliest EBS Volume in ~ 10 Seconds?

Using the TotalCloud platform’s unique selected-resource grouping feature, pan and zoom controls, and cost analysis, you will know which is the costliest EBS volume in a matter of just ~10 seconds.

From the video below, you can see that after you log in to the console and turn on the cost (~7 seconds), you can compare and contrast cost of each resources & find out which is the costliest volume in ~10 seconds.

More Quick Tips:

While you have learnt how to monitor EBS volume usage and pricing easily and quickly using TotalCloud, here are few tips that can help you save EBS costs further:

Delete or reuse orphaned EBS Volumes:

If you uncheck delete EBS volumes while creating an EC2 instance and ignore them after terminating the instance attached to it, then EBS Volumes continue to exist and incur cost. Reuse available volumes and terminate orphaned volumes.

Never ignore EBS Snapshots:

AWS bills EBS snapshots too. Get rid of outdated snapshots that do not hold any practical value, from time to time.

Never attach oversized volumes to EC2s

Estimate EBS volumes’ requirement right before attaching, taking capacity, IOPS, and throughput of the application into consideration. Don’t forget to monitor the read-write access volumes of the blocks from time to time. And downgrade the EBS blocks if the throughput is low.

Choose the right EBS Volume

Never choose provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volume type for normal EC2 instances; unless the applications are mission-critical and needs more than 10000 IOPS or 160 MiB/s of throughput per volume.

If you are interested in getting more quick help on monitoring your AWS resources,sign-up for TotalCloud.ioand experience easy visual cloud management.

TotalCloud is a visual and interactive cloud management platform. Built using a 3D gaming engine, it helps monitor and analyze all the cloud infrastructure frame by frame based on user's actions and renders it in real.